but little is expected by those who dwell in the environs of the lawn bowling court

for them it is a perennial Mondo Samarkanda a pointed tin roof above cute wood shinglesthe ghost of Reagan bumbling through the palmsamid a sunset out of Papua New Guinealike a great snork bird homing in on orange juice

24 comments:

This post is inspired in part by the nice reception to Charles W. Bartlett's woodblock prints on the previous post.

Lanny Quarles, always on the mark, said of that work: "It looks like Moebius, or rather M looks like B? Seems to have a very nice take on the ukiyo-e style..that late 19th century uptake from the japanese arts was phenomenally useful. the flatness gives it paradoxically a conceptual depth... a creamy dreaminess."

On this post Bartlett is seen in his Surf Period.

Flatness and creamy dreaminess. An Englishman, trained in the French academic studio style in the Impressionist period, becoming eventually one of the finest woodblock print artists in the ukiyo-e "floating-world" style.

A bit about Bartlett. His first wife and their child died in childbirth. Grieving he wandered Europe. He built a career and remarried to the heiress of a Scots shipbuilding fortune. Traveling to the Far East in 1913 on his second wife's money, he encountered the Japanese publisher Shozaburo Watanabe, who had been creating reproduction prints of ukiyo-e artists. Bartlett had probably had some prior acquaintance with the late 19th c. "Orientalist" tradition under his teacher in France, Boulanger. Watanabe had an interest in making new, original prints using the traditional ukiyo-e production method, involving collaboration of designer, block carver, and printer. He took a look at Bartlett's watercolours and suggested they create woodblock prints. On Watanabe's instigation, Bartlett took formal training in the use of the Japanese style brush. Together they made several groups of prints. The first group included six scenes from India, two of which are the images on Mnemonic, the post below this one.

Bartlett ended up settling in Hawaii and becoming a happy printmaker with a hermitage in a lush green valley. And kept on looking for that wave.

Lovely picture, and nice but at least for me kindofcomplicated to understand text, many english words I did not know, but that is good I am learning.Regarding the poem:I think that aspiring for xanadu is kind of a resignation in life.

And I like the story from where this post was inspired, I like knowing that kind of things, they help me understand better.

A few hints about the poem. The setting is approximate Southern California Generic; the specific locale, Santa Barbara and its environs. Samarkand is a neighbourhood in Santa Barbara. In the poem I imagine that Xanadu is also a neighbourhood; in fact it's not; it is as you know a mythic place confabulated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Orson Welles (et al.) out of the name of the Chinese city Shangzu.

The exotic Samarkand of the spice trade routes and other such mystery names of romance and poetry became part of the general unreal creamy/dreamy Southern California cultural landscape a century ago. Here I imagine Santa Barbara as the epicenter of that slightly chintzy paradisal SoCal dream of Tiki Tacky houses and palm trees whose fronds and fruits are made of money.

The ghost of Reagan in the poem is just that, the phantom spectre of the ex president, who dwelt at times during his presidency and then through to the end of his life in a ranch above Santa Barbara. One day when we were living in Mission Canyon the bells of Mission Santa Barbara rang out melodiously at noon to celebrate the occasion of Reagan doing lunch with his guest Queen Elizabeth of England. It was a little like the famous Field of the Cloth of Gold in which the Tudor King of England Henry VIII met up amid great prefabricated splendour with his counterpart the grand and proud French monarch Francis I... if, that is, the earlier occasion had been produced by Walt Disney.

Tom,Thanks for this lovely "tropism in Xanadu" piece w/ such further words on Bartlett (I was wondering who he was, imagining he might be related to the same Bartletts who had that collection of great 19th c. paintings at the Chicago Art Institute (but no it seems). I was just looking at a piece in yesterday's NY Times about the revival of ancient Hawaiian surfboards now going on -- called alaias, here's a photo from Bishop museum in Honolulu -- http://www.tomwegenersurfboards.com/elements/gallery/alaia/gallery_alaia.html -- so this seems to keep that all going on still. . . .

Thanks Tom, how great to think/say that alaias "look like forever" (wish I WAS riding one, I think they'd work in the channel (waves in one of those films looked like waves we see here (more or less). . . .

Your diurnal poem gifts along with my nocturnal visits to your blog are permitting me to inkle a bit less dimly (bulb goes on) the uses of the repeatable and non repeatable units in these looped/cycled iterative landscape meditations, with the second and thirds of each four sets of units withdrawing a distance for consideration/reflection but the bracketing "outside" (first and fourth) units keeping in motion the images that will then flow and illuminate back and forward to the succeeding and following pieces in the sequence, as a kind of controlled flooding across the channels. (The two-line units have a linear horizontal "look" which could suggest channels, or perhaps boards in channels.)

Not until the 1970s did the British mathematician and cosmologist become the first to describe these geometric designs in the West. Quasicrystalline patterns, sets of interlocking units whose pattern never repeats, even when extended infinitely in all directions; possessing thus a special form of symmetry. A controlled flooding of the channels.

So that readers may follow your channel on their own alaias this would be a convenient beach-break . (And that link is now on the left margin here too, provided, Steve, you don't mind occasionally hosting escaped inmates of this forgotten island colony?)

And speaking of kaleidoscopic designs...It has taken the ever astute Otto to remind me of what Gamefaced had earlier sussed out re. the period setting of this poem, which is of course dated by the "tropism" reference to the Olivia N-J number, popular under the spot-lit, rat-infested fortune palms in 1980, beginning of the Decade of Great Emptiness.

Here in homage to Gamefaced and Otto (name that tune) we see the period in its full polyester flowering, ELO courting ONJ in, yes, Xanadu .

The overhead kaleidoscope into which ONJ is upwardly abducted at the end appears, if somewhat less nonrepeatably quasicrystalline in structure than medieval mosque ceiling patterns, than at least cooler and a bit more hygienic than the pit into which Sigourney Weaver would have to plunge, pregnant with the even worse epoch to follow. ( But of course cosmic justice murmurs from the wings that as a child of the relatively faux innocent Seventies, ONJ had been nowhere near as bad inside.)

And last but not least, since not only have you, Otto, mentioned it, but, speaking of channels, my back channels are awash with confusion on the subject (keeping my elves from their appointed seasonal rounds), it may be interesting to some to enquire independently into this colloquium on the burning question, what is a snork bird? .

Some great minds are at work here. A sample exchange.

I thought the Snork was the bird that brought baby home after the bees had sex with your mommy and daddy because they loved each other.

Dear Tom,,Thanks for your extended thoughts on the work going on here -- and what a coincidence (!) to see your grey photos/poem just now this morning, seeing what it is I see and here (and have 'transcribed' into today's poem, the next 'installment' in what does seem to be an unending work -- today is page number 607 in what I'm calling Temporality, which picks up where Remarks on Color / Sound (1,000 pages, same 'shape' on page) left off -- and that picking up where HUMAN / NATURE (1,000 pages) and CLOUD / RIDGE (474 pages) and REAL (474 pages) left off -- all of these written in consecutive days. . . . So your thoughts on "quasicrystalline medieval mosque ceiling designs" strikes a certain chord. So yes, I'm pleased to have "escaped inmates from this forgotten island colony" visit what's going on there -- maybe will be of interest to someone. . . .

TC..'I thought the Snork was the bird that brought baby home after the bees had sex with your mommy and daddy because they loved each other.'this comment made my tuesday smiley : )

otto..i've been thinking i need to like, go on a cruise or day spa trip or something how 'adults' do to escape but no, i think i want you to save me a spot on hard floor pour myself a heap of cinnamon life and watch smurfs till nap time.